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May 1, 2019

Here’s an early preview of Dinosaur Kit: an AR dinosaur skeleton building app for Magic Leap. Featuring amazing skeletons by Vitamin Imagination.

My brother and I wanted to make a game some time ago. The scope was too big. This is what we got so far, but it's clear we need a bigger team and funding to do this.

The game is a single-player, top-down adventure/shooter, where you switch between on foot and mech warfare. You fight against Lovecraftian cosmic horrors and the mad Martian general, who brought them back to our Solar System. Good thing it's the future, so maybe you stand a chance with your heavy equipment, advanced weapons and nano-technology..? Be careful. You could be dead wrong, human.

We didn't get to the fighting cosmic horrors part yet, so all we can show now is shooting humans. What you see in this video is a general gameplay style in it's very early stage of development. The graphics, mechanics, camera movement, sounds etc. are all to be heavily modified or replaced, but the general play style is visible at this point. The missing part at this point, that would show the full core gameplay, is in-game cutscenes and voice overed dialogues during gameplay.

It’s a great pleasure to announce that Kubold’s Dinosaur Kit was selected for the Magic Leap Independent Creator Program.

Dinosaur Kit is an AR app for Magic Leap, that will allow you to assemble life size dinosaur skeletons and learn interesting facts about their anatomy. And of course, the dinosaurs will have realistic animations and will interact with you!

This is a bigger game template, constructed using my FPP Melee Animset and other mocap animations from my and Riko's collection.

It includes melee fighting with many different weapons, which have different damage, range, blocking ability, speed and (not shown here) durability. The player has health and armour stats (just like in classic FPS shooters), but also Mana, which allows to cast different spells, which you can learn from scrolls. Template also includes some interactive obstacles, traps, health and mana potions etc.

The set of over 360 animations for 5 medieval weapon types has been released at Unreal Marketplace.

Tips for usage (you may use them, but you don’t have to):

If the camera parented to the head feels to shaky and you would like it to be more static, you can constrain its rotation by code, for example with look at constraint. You could also unparent the camera from the head bone and make it follow the head bone by code, which will give you more control – you could dampen the rotations and translations, add procedural camera shake etc.

For retargeting purposes, there are no weapon bones or camera bones. You parent the weapon models directly to hands and the camera directly to the head.

To achieve “full body awareness”, you may use leg walking animations from Sword & Shield Animset Pro (see other Kubold’s animation packs on the store). This way, when the player looks down, he can see the legs.

You can use this set for single handed weapons without the shield too (just hide the shield in Unity)

If you want to hide all weapons and just have an animated camera head bobbing for unarmed mode, you can use any animation from this set – just disable the renderer on the weapons and hands, after “unequip weapon” animation.

All animations are “in-place” (there is no root motion, since FPP characters feel best when moving from code). This means, that some animations, like Dodge back, Knockdown, Stun, Crouch, Walk, Run etc., will make visual sense only in combination with character capsule movement. So for example, a “Dodge back” animation should include an actual moving the character capsule back by 3-4 meters from code. A second example: you should lower the character by code, when playing “Crouch Start” animation, so the character really crouches.

You can slightly adjust your camera to modify how all animations look in the viewport – change FOV, height and up/down rotation as you prefer